"I don't know."
"Eh? How come? I should think there'd be no doubt, one way or the
other, if you have that much of the limb clear."
"Well, I haven't. I got as far as the bone goes--and right there I run
out of tuff and into the limestone. If there's anything more, it's in
an entirely different kind of rock, which is a trifle unlikely; but I'm
going to have to check the blocks we cut from this part of the tunnel
in order to make sure, and I don't look forward to the job at all."
Krendall, properly sympathetic, came around to Sulewayo's side to look,
and agreed that the search was necessary. The bone the younger man had
been clearing ended in a joint of the type they had come to regard as
typical of the creature's limbs; and this had occurred almost exactly
at the surface they had left when first outlining the block with the
saw.
Sulewayo, with a grunt of disgust, dropped his tools and went out into
the rain, where the blocks cut from the cliff had been piled; Krendall,
nobly sacrificing his personal inclinations, went along with him.
* * * * *
The search lasted for a long time; for a long time, in fact, after it
became evident that it was going to be useless, for the chance of a
perfect specimen is not easily thrown away. Finally, however, Krendall
straightened up with a sigh.
"I guess we'll have to be satisfied with a restoration on one side," he
said wearily. "I hope someone fifty years from now doesn't find another
and discover that it's a sort of vertebrate fiddler crab, with one
fore-limb ending in a paw or claw something like five times the size of
the one on the other."
Sulewayo gave a gloomy assent, and the two went back to work in their
respective tunnels.
Lampert saw McLaughlin the instant the underbrush made it possible, a
fact which the guide later admitted was to the scientist's credit. He
had, of course, been eagerly awaiting that return, for the transmitter
was down to its first set depth and awaiting only the word that all
receivers were in place. He called eagerly the moment the guide came
within earshot.
"Everything down?" McLaughlin nodded.
"Everything down, as nearly as I could tell the way you said. How long
will the readings take?"
"Only a few minutes. I'll take a couple of calibration shots from ten,
fifteen and twenty meters' depth; then ones at fifty, a hundred and so
on down as far as the mole will go. The shooting takes practically no
time. It's the drilling that will hold us up."
"What then?"
"Well," Lampert smiled, "after that the usual procedure is to pick up
the receivers and place them in a similar pattern in a new direction.
If the field crew doesn't go on strike, we take the whole circle about
the transmitter."
"I was afraid of that," grunted McLaughlin, as he stopped by the
machine. "Well, let's go." The two men bent over the controls in a
silence broken only by the scraping of Mitsuitei's shovel a dozen
meters away. Lampert pressed his shot button, and a light on the panel
flashed white momentarily. Below their feet, unfelt, the pulse of sound
energy raced outward, echoing from the walls of deepstriking joints,
from the boundaries between rocks of differing densities or elastic
constants, from the walls of caverns deep in the limestone; some tiny
portion of the energy from time to time encountering and affecting one
of the tiny receivers McLaughlin had buried.
As each receiver gathered its bit of data, it retransmitted the
information to the master unit; and everything was recorded on a
single sheet as the milliseconds sped by. Long before a full second
had passed, the first of the pulses had damped out as heat energy,
and enough had been transmitted for the machine to obtain an adequate
averaging record. The light blinked out again. Lampert nodded in
satisfaction, and sent the mole downward once more.
"Look, good. Now the next set," he remarked.
* * * * *
As that pulse of seismic energy went forth, the Felodon rose to its
full height, almost showing itself over the pile of dirt which was now
its sole protection from the view of the men. The snarl on its face
seemed to grow fiercer, if that were possible. For just an instant it
seemed torn by conflicting desires. But that was for just an instant;
any tendency to flee was smothered before it could take full form.
There were two men now to worry about, and correspondingly less chance
for the opportunity it had been awaiting. But the opportunity came. For
just a moment the guide looked down at the panel which was absorbing
Lampert's full attention. In that moment a green-and-lavender streak
flowed over the heap of soil in a single leap and vanished into the
pit. It must have been timed and guided by the mysterious sense
McLaughlin had mentioned. It could see none of the men when it leaped,
yet it timed the act for the moment none were looking, and landed
directly on Mitsuitei.
The little archaeologist never knew what hit him. He died without
a sound, and the killer, as though nothing lived anywhere in the
neighborhood, settled down to its meal.
In this it must have been disappointed. The chemicals in the clothing
designed to repel Viridian insects were equally obnoxious to the
carnivore, and it made no serious attempt to get through them. However,
not all of the body was protected in this way....
A second pulse went from the buried transmitter, and then a third,
each from a point a few meters deeper than the last. Lampert's
attention, of course, was centered on his controls. McLaughlin's eyes
were once more sweeping restlessly over the surrounding landscape. Both
heard the sounds coming from the pit, but neither interpreted them
as anything more than the scraping of Mitsuitei's shovel. Neither,
of course, considered them consciously. Their attention was finally
attracted by something decidedly more noticeable.
The Felodon did not--or could not?--remain at its meal for more than a
few moments. Its apparent indifference to the other men changed once
more to what seemed like an internal struggle. An observer would have
been sure, up to now, that it was using its peculiar sense to avoid the
sight of men with guns; but that hypothesis failed now.
As Lampert started the mole robot downward once more, the Felodon
leaped out of the pit toward the two men--regardless of the fact that
McLaughlin was facing toward it.